old topic i know, but damn I dont get this, how does letting third party companies decide to put lan in their games or not hurt nintendo? It would not cost them any money, and even for nintendo games i dont get how people tunneling lan games is bad for them. They dont have to pay for servers or anything, and if people tunnel the games they will be playing them for a long time which keeps that game franchise fresh in their memorym, so when the next chapter in the series comes out they would be more likely to buy it.

i agree with you. i think by nintendo doing this it only slowed software sales and GC sales. the people who wanted online either went to sony or microsoft. they should have at least let 3rd parties choose. i can't see how this would have hurt them in anyway.

I sent lordnikon a pm about his comment on the restriction of distributing drivers, etc, and he said, "My comments then were merely speculation based on trends I saw at the time. Now, I would consider them to be false assumptions." He went on to talk about how Nintendo has to approve games with network functions, in order for them to come out.

Anyway, I did research on this at my University, by looking up articles in the business section of its article database, and from what I could tell, it wasn't that either. The PS2 and Xbox didn't have many games simply because developers felt the need to compete with the first party developers' offerings, on the contrary Sony and Microsoft were actually paying third parties to put networking features into their games. If I recall correctly, one of the articles even said something along the lines of, "Microsoft and Sony have been encouraging third party developers to release games with online features through solicitation, while Nintendo remains behind in the race." I might be able to get a direct quote later.

So as far as I could tell, the reason why the Gamecube had so few LAN games is that developers didn't want to spend the extra time and money to put network and online features into their games if they weren't getting paid to do it, especially since only a few GC games supported LAN play, and even the case of those, the feature wasn't known to many people, even though the back covers of each game mention it.

In addition to what MasquedWarrior said, Nintendo was often too hesitant to distribute network SDKs to third-party companies outside of Japan. This is what prevented Ubisoft from including network play in their Splinter Cell/Ghost Recon ports. It was simply a matter of Nintendo acting uncooperative with perhaps a slight hint of xenophobia.

In addition to what MasquedWarrior said, Nintendo was often too hesitant to distribute network SDKs to third-party companies outside of Japan. This is what prevented Ubisoft from including network play in their Splinter Cell/Ghost Recon ports. It was simply a matter of Nintendo acting uncooperative with perhaps a slight hint of xenophobia.

Really? Where did you hear this? Lordnikon said something like that, but retracted it in his pm to me, as I mentioned above. However, you are being more specific than him, implying that it's not just a speculation. If you do have a reliable source confirming this, I would really like to read it. Speaking of which, I did find a few articles about online multiplayer on consoles, but none of them mentioned Sony and Microsoft soliciting developers.

Can't find the article stating it at the moment, but I believe Ubisoft did state at one point Nintendo left them in the dark regarding online capabilities. The deal with Sega was made before the GameCube was even released, so Nintendo, honoring their long-time rival, held up their end of the deal.

Also, the only network capable games were either first-party titles or those made by Japanese companies. Outside of games with internet rankings (which I'm not really counting), none of the online titles were from an American or European company.

At this point, yes, it is just speculation. But the chances of Nintendo or anyone else really coming out and stating the reason(s) behind the dearth of network capable games on GameCube is nil.

(Note: Many of the points I made in this thread in years past, may be outdated since my perspective on the state of GameCube Online is much different now due to newly acquired information.)

In the very beginning, Nintendo of course was open to online gaming. Which was why they included the BBA and 56K modem. Their willingness for Sega to bring PSO to the GameCube was purely business. Cube was a good match for PSO, and at the time PSO was still very popular on the PC and Dreamcast in Japan. If there was any game worthy to test the waters of online with, it was PSO. Also this was at a time when Sega had just started going multiplatform. Imagine you are Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft at the time. A company like Sega is all of a sudden opening their library of titles to everyone. Each company was fighting for Sega franchises at the time, trying to workout deals to get various Sega games on their system.

Sometime after this, Nintendo probobly decided that online gaming wasn't in their best interests. They probobly had a long list of reasons, but in the end, they clearly decided to back off from online features.

I am not sure whether Nintendo was witholding network dev kits, or they were there all along, but third party companies needed the game to pass Nintendo's approval process in order to ship a game with online features.

Nintendo, like any other company, will go to whatever lengths necessary to protect the image they are trying to uphold when marketing their console to the consumer. Remember, after PSO came out Nintendo decided they didn't want to market the GameCube as an Online console. For whatever reason, this is what they chose. If they gave companies like EA or Ubisoft the greenlight to flood the system with yearly rehashes of Tom Clancy and Madden titles, they would be unable to maintain the GameCube as being a non-online game console.

So why was a company like Chunsoft able to create Homeland?

No keyboard support, which means Nintendo is not under pressure to provide communication equipment for players.

Japan Exclusive title

Cute, Colorful, and I am sure Miyamoto had an orgasm when he heard about players in the game having to hold hands

Homeland is just 1 game, and not sequel mania

Chunsoft hosted the game

Now we get to LAN games and the reason only so many were developed. A lot of it probobly has to do with Hardware. Nintendo made an innitial batch of Broadband Adapters, expecting that they may get big into online. Well, that didn't happen. So now you have all of these BBA's laying around, and nobody is buying them since everyone who wanted to play PSO already bought one. So to increase the sales of the BBA's they integrate LAN support into a few key game titles from Nintendo first party developers. Releasing more GameCube LAN titles would have meant needing to manufacture more BBA's.

If you are looking for the smoking gun in all of this, it was that Nintendo was very careful about which projects they chose to approve for using network features in order to uphold the marketing of the cube as a system without an online network. It's better to be seen as having no online at all, rather than a horribly pathetic online lineup. By keeping the cube isolated to just PSO, and a few LAN games they were able to maintain the idea that the GameCube simply was not an online game console. Had they allowed a Splinter Cell here, or TimeSplitters there... the cube would have cought even more flack for not delivering more online gaming.

Nintendo is taking a cautious course, with the view that online gaming is not yet a viable market. Nintendo launched its first online title with PHANTASY STAR ONLINE EPISODE I & II for Gamecube in October 2002. Players must purchase a separate dial-up or broadband adapter ($35) to play online. Like Sony, Nintendo is not charging a sign-up or subscription fee. Online services must be built by the game developer or accessed via third-party middleware.

Nintendo has been characteristically tight-lipped about future online plans for Gamecube. At the time of this writing, Nintendo does not appear to be enforcing any types of policy decisions about voice communication, keyboard chat, or global identities. There are also no indications that Nintendo is committing large resources to back-end services or other online infrastructure.

This information is unsuprising. It just enforces opinions we already came to. However, what's more interesting is this,

Quote:

GameSpy, one of several popular network middleware vendors, provides libraries for peer-to-peer matchmaking, statistics, security, and voice chat. GameSpy provides similar libraries and services for Gamecube. GameSpy's history with PC network solutions makes it a good choice for cross-platform development on PCs, PS2, and Gamecube.

So, apparently, Gamespy hosting online Gamecube games was a possibility at one point in time.